Hello! I've been going great guns the past month or so, basically traceable to the day I got rid of my old chair and spent 3 hours moving a giant reclining and massively comfortable armchair into my office. This has made a huge difference to my mindset. Previously, I think tilt was starting off by manifesting as pain and general discomfort. The chair was just really badly made, it tilted forwards and had a really small seating area and I swear I had to struggle to stay on it!
So yeah since then I've had 90k hands winning at 7bb. Other mental stuff has helped, I resolved to lose all my fear again by basically facing it- this means accepting that things are going to go wrong a lot and that this is fine. Freed from the shackles of fear, all sorts of creative lines present themselves.
I've also been *thinking* about poker a lot, and this is the big difference between a 'grinder' mindset and the mindset of a crusher. A grinding mindset is a predictable one; there are very few surprises when I'm up against any high volume player. AA is always 3bet and 4bet. Draws are always barreled. Bluffs are never made into strong ranges. Exceptions to this are few and far between- I'd probably list Flippety, OTB, Amarn and Wizard as the few capable of mixing it a little it. They all do pretty well.
I've had a slight wobble the past couple of days and that's what this blog is about addressing. I have a notepad file with a list of technical concepts to think about and this has gotten really really long. This means I have loads of random concepts floating around my head that need committing to paper. These shouldn't be too much of a problem though, and they probably fall outside the scope of this blog given the number of them. The main issue the past few days has just been one of mindset. A certain sense of 'micro rushing' that I can't quite explain any other way.
Basically what it means is that, say you're in a hurry to play lots of good hands and get rich like I am, then this can result in unhelpful behaviours such as rushing in the short term. It's like a fractal, if your overall aim is to quickly get rich, then you can zoom and zoom down into that mindset and find that decisions are rushed, variance is deliberately but subconsciously increased, even the mouse is clicked much faster. This causes the opposite of what it is intended to do- and I've found in life that this is a constant 'law of the universe'- 'grasping' at your goal means it is never attained.
A couple of technical reminders before I finish- basically the goal of crushing cash poker is to constantly be thinking in terms of making sure our range is protected. Whenever an idea seems good 'in a vacuum', the fact that we haven't considered our entire range probably means that our intentions are pretty obvious.
To take an example, say on the river we have a range of air and obvious bluffcatchers that are always calling. To fold out the air we only need to bet 1/3 pot. To get max value we need to bet much bigger. Because people don't think about the entirety of their own and our range, they end up just betting the 1/3 with their bluffs and going 3/4 with their value. Good players notice this and you get annihilated in that spot, perhaps without ever even realising that you are- which is actually probably the true killer!
So in that spot, we need a consistent size. Splitting the difference and going 2/3ish is probably enough disguise, though it obviously depends on the ratio of value to bluffs too.
Ok that's enough for now, I'm going to play and take my time and have fun and see what happens. By the way I'm going to cull a lot of people from the readership so I know who's reading, so if you want to stay reading please let me know either in the comments or on Skype. Off the top of my head I'll probably keep Chris, Dodgy, Pawel without them needing to ask as I don't ever play VS them. Anyone else, please lemme know. Bye.
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